Music Kickup Will Distribute Your Music in Less than an Hour… For Free

Digital distributor Music Kickup says they can upload your music to iTunes in less than an hour… 100% free with no limits.

Music Kickup also claims to upload music to Google Play, Spotify and Deezer within 48 hours. Artists keep all rights and royalties.

How can this be? It sounds too good to be true… Well, Music Kickup says distribution is just one part of their business, and they make up for the hit in other areas. The company believes distribution should be a free service, saying:

“For us the question was never about why should it be free – it was always a question of why the hell are people paying for it! As an industry we’re leaking hundreds of millions of euros/dollars/pounds away from the industry to third party companies – companies that are not returning these profits to rotation. This had to change. For us this change comes naturally.”

Music Kickup is currently only available to artists, but will soon open up for labels.

The company will soon launch artist development and management tools under the name Career Path. This service will include unnamed partnerships with other companies and services.

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I tried it, and no joke they got my song on iTunes in about 30 minutes. However they say my track is both “to be released” and “failed” on Spotify, and that it is released to Google Play (which I can’t find), and Deezer (which I can’t test from in the U.S. – for now). We’ll see how it goes!

LOL. I nearly took this seriously until i saw their horrific SEO tag here. Look, anyone can put music online, but the day to day work of keeping it there costs money and you need staff you can rely on.
Having a few contracts and launching a site is a short term strategy that is going to fail

That’s not possible, because before albums are live on Itunes, Apple checks EVERY album. And you never know when the staff is available. Moreover, there’s always a lot of albums BEFORE yours to be checked first. So be live in less than 24-48 hours CANNOT BE GURANTEED AT ALL!!!!!

If I buy a hamburger from a burger joint, and the place closes down the next day, big deal. If my digital distributor closes down tomorrow, I have a real problem. Which is why I like to see a company in the marketplace for at least a few years before I’d feel comfortable trusting that company with my catalog.

Let’s see if they are still there … next year
Who can believe, that they are able to distribute bands and labels freely on a long term period?
I am 100% sure that either they’ll go bankrupt or they’ll charge you on a way or another, even if you don’t use any additionnal services.

The “100% free” offer is a teasing to make people subscribe / to collect emails.
It worked (apparently) since they said they have more than 60,000 people registered now.

Then once they have your contact, they try to sell you a 99€/year subscription to access a set of tools, consisting mainly in some kind of mass mailing / social sharing stuff (something that already exists for free elsewhere).

They will also try to convince you to use a service by a company named 3plet, a Russian venture defending the concept of “album as an app”, who believe it is possible to sell that kind of product (whereas all past similar experiences failed).

This set of tools/services is what they call “Career Path”.

They are backed up by a Finnish investment fund and are burning shitloads of money in promotion/marketing (I can’t imagine the cost of their big stand at MIDEM…)

That’s all I learned, oh and yes, according to them “all digital distributors are assholes”.
It gives you the tone of their communication / PR strategy.

They are all around 20-25 years old (except the CEO and the Russian guy), and the dress-code of the company seems to be “techno-punk-viking”. But the few girls on the stand were quite nice though.

So let’s see in 2-3 years how these Revolutionaries / Experts in music business perform.

Only the most hugely inflated ego will believe that someone would go to all the bother of of dealing with support, and accounting for their less than fantastic music for free. The feeling of entitlement that might just drive this company is mind blowing.

“why the hell are people paying for it!” Just wait until you have tens of thousands of artists digging into royalty questions (Quite legitimately), demanding statistics, take downs, cover changes, Asking about Spotify artist profile creation etc etc and then you will understand. Music kickup is incredibly naive at best and an intentional scam at worst. Good luck being around to pay out royalties for the second half of this year.

They may have investor money but when their storage and bandwidth starts to outweigh any of their clients using their “Career Path” they will be in the red. It’s a bold attempt but one that’s plagued with a lot of issues and for the “New Kid On The Block” to have such a cocky attitude calling other companies assholes and such just gives every Digital Distributor immense firepower to discredit their brand for their lack of professionalism. Anyway….

If asking people to pay for a service is “unfair exploitation” then there is lot of unfair exploitation in this world.
Making people think a company can offer some services for free with no compensation is unfair exploitation of credulity.

“false expectations”: I don’t think any distributor is telling artists they’ll magically become superstars because their songs are on iTunes and Spotify.
Most (if not all) of us say: we put your music on iTunes…etc, the price is x$ and the royalty share is x%.

I was unclear – I did not hear them bad mouthing companies nor distribution companies for that matter. What I took away from it was that they where talking of the bigger industry at that point and artist insecurity exploitation. I didn’t see that it would have been targeted towards distribution

As the sole inventor of the “100% Free Distribution” model that Music Kickup has adopted (I’ve invented the model more than 5 years ago), I can certainly tell you all that this model will not work. While I do congratulate them on their press and their launch, I caution the well educated artists who may fall for the temptation. Just because something is the most cheapest, doesn’t mean it is always the best solution. It’s all about security and how sustainable the model will be long-term.

When choosing a distributor, you have to be well-educated about how their approach will play into your overall music career and business plan. From there, you’ll be able to have a sound partnership and have a great experience.

Ha. What they’re not highlighting is the abysmal payment terms. As an artist, I would rather use a trusted distributor that actually pays. They say they’ll hold on to payment for 6 months! That will be around the time they go out of business and screw all the artists.

My goal as an artist is to advance my career, make money, and not get screwed. If you expect everything for free, you will get screwed.

Well, it looks like they removed some very disturbing language from their FAQ section. In there own words they pointed out that artists royalties are paid out after the company covers administrative costs and that the company (Musickickup) has the right to determine what that cost would be. It sounds to me that you upload your music for “Free” but you don’t really receive royalties. This is as scammy as I’ve seen.

Every single reputable distributor has their pros and cons but I would advise artists to stick to the guys who’ve been there and that have great management teams who make good decisions for their clients. Cdbaby, Tunecore, Reverb, Mondo tunes, etc. have been there and own the market. Some do better things than others but I would suggest sticking to the guys that know the industry and have delivered.

I’ve done extensive research on the A-list and gladly will share my opinion should anyone be interested. Musickickup, Distro kid and some of the other newbies popping up are the one hit wonders and soon to be gone. They’re the neon light downtown clubs that aren’t sustainable. They may sound cheap and sound too good to be true, because they are. At some point the business costs cannot support their business model. It